Notate’s “My Files” (also referred to as the Notate Drive) is each user's own place in Notate for their notes, documents and folders. For customers on Microsoft 365, Notate stores the data in the user's own OneDrive. The Notate app policy notateDriveMode decides where it lives.
Each user's OneDrive must be provisioned before Notate can use it. Microsoft creates a user's OneDrive the first time they open it, unless your organization provisions OneDrive in advance, so a user who has never opened OneDrive should open it once, or you can pre-provision it.
How Notate stores Notate Drive in OneDrive
|
Folder |
What it holds |
|---|---|
|
Notate Drive (app-managed), in the user's OneDrive |
Every folder, note and document the user keeps in Notate, including everything moved from Exchange. |
|
.notate, inside Notate Drive (app-managed) |
Notate's own data: cached files, favorites, recents and the app policies you set. |
The files are ordinary OneDrive files. Users can open and edit them from OneDrive as well as from Notate. The one thing to avoid is changing or deleting the .notate folder. Because it sits in the user's own OneDrive, a user can delete it; if that happens, Notate rebuilds most of it.
What this means for administrators
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Your data stays in your tenant. Shafer Systems does not host or keep a copy of your documents.
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Nothing new to approve. No additional Microsoft charges, no new Microsoft Entra ID permissions, no server software and no Azure subscription. The permissions you already granted to Notate cover OneDrive.
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Your existing policies apply. Purview retention, DLP, eDiscovery and audit already cover OneDrive, so they cover Notate Drive, and OneDrive keeps version history.
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It follows your OneDrive retention. When someone leaves, their Notate Drive is kept or deleted under the same retention settings as the rest of their OneDrive.
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No EWS needed once you are on OneDrive. Notate reaches email attachments through Microsoft Graph, so a customer on
onedrivedoes not need Exchange Web Services at all.
The notateDriveMode policy
|
Value |
Meaning |
Use it when |
|---|---|---|
|
|
Notate Drive stays in the user's Exchange mailbox, through Exchange Web Services. The default. |
Your users' mailboxes are on Exchange Server on-premises. |
|
|
Notate copies the user's Notate Drive from Exchange to their OneDrive, then runs on OneDrive. Nothing is deleted from Exchange. |
You are on Exchange Online and your users already have data in Notate. See Step 2: Move Notate Drive to OneDrive. |
|
|
Notate Drive starts in OneDrive. Nothing is moved. |
You are new to Notate on Microsoft 365. |
|
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Copies Notate Drive from Exchange to SharePoint Embedded. |
Only for customers who already chose SharePoint Embedded. See Notate and SharePoint Embedded. |
|
|
Notate Drive in SharePoint Embedded, with nothing moved. |
Only for customers who already chose SharePoint Embedded. |
Set the value in your MDM's app configuration for Notate. It reaches each device the next time it checks in, and Notate applies it the next time the user signs in. The full list of policies is in Notate MDM application policy configuration.
After the move
Keep migrate_to_onedrive, or change to onedrive
Either is fine once your users have moved.
-
Keep
migrate_to_onedriveif new users may already have Notate notes in their Exchange mailbox. Those notes move to OneDrive when the user first starts Notate. -
Change to
onedriveif you would rather new users start fresh. Nothing is moved, and Notate Drive starts empty in OneDrive.
Going back to Exchange
You can set a user back to ews, but nothing is copied back. Notate Drive returns to the copy in the user's mailbox as it was when they moved. Anything they created or changed in OneDrive stays in OneDrive and is not deleted, but it does not appear in Notate while the user is on ews.